Wheelchair Control Based on Facial Gesture Recognition

Abstract

In this article, an approach for controlling a wheelchair using gestures from the user's face is presented, particularly some commands for the basic control operations required for driving a wheelchair are recognized. In order to recognize the face gestures an Artificial Neural Network which is trained since it is one of the most successful classifiers in Pattern Recognition. In particular, the authors' proposed method is useful for controlling a wheelchair when the user has restricted (or zero) mobility in some parts of the body such as: legs, arms or hands. According to their experimental results, the proposed approach provides a successful tool for controlling a wheelchair through a Natural User Interface based on machine learning.